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Technology + LearningWed, 27 Feb 2013 01:23:02 +0000en-UShourly1How to open (non-DRM) iBooks without an iPad or iPhonehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thoughtshots/~3/9Yt0_wwm-jc/
http://www.thoughtshots.com/2012/08/how-to-open-non-drm-ibooks-without-an-ipad-or-iphone/#respondSat, 04 Aug 2012 02:20:50 +0000http://www.thoughtshots.com/?p=286iTunes can do a lot of things. You can buy media (like music or movies) and play them. But when it comes to books, you’ll find you can buy them, but can’t open them with iTunes. If you believe Apple’s own documentation, you can apparently only open iBooks on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch (the latter two running iOS 4.0 or later). For iTunes users not familiar with these limitations, it can be an incredibly frustrating experience to buy something only to realize you can’t open it.

If you’ve found yourself in this situation, there’s a potential workaround thanks to Apple’s use of ePUB, the closest thing that exists to a digital book standard. The only hitch is that many books for sale on the iBooks store have been copy protected, meaning you can’t open them without any of the aforementioned iDevices. In this article, I’ll be detailing exactly how to open an iBook (without copy protection) on your computer.

If you haven’t already downloaded the book from iTunes, make sure you’ve done so by clicking the Download button on the book you’ve purchased. If you’ve already downloaded the book, the button appears grayed out and says Downloaded.

Find the book by opening your Books Library, which is accessed from the menubar on the left. This displays the covers of all the books in your library in the main window. To find out if your book has copy protection, right click the book you want to open and select Get Info. In the Information popup window, the first field underneath the cover says Kind. If it says “Protected Book” in this field, you cannot open the book without an iOS device. Anything else in this field (such as “Purchased Book” or just “Book”) means you can continue. Right click the book again and select Show in Finder (Windows users will see Show in Windows Explorer).

This will bring up a Finder (or Explorer) window with your file selected.

If you’ve already associated ePUB files with the application you installed, simply double click to open the file. Otherwise, right click and select Open With and select the application.

It’s time once again, to explore the deepest and darkest corners of Tumblr. This time around, I’ve got a question from rajvir92, who asks:

I am an amateur photographer and i use tumblr to upload my photos. however whenever i post my photos tumblr shows it in small size not in its orginal size. how can i post the picture of its original size. is there a way or any theme that can show the photo in bigger size than the regular size that tumblr shows?

There’s a couple different options available to change this, and what you choose will depend on the amount of tweaking you’ll want to do.

The easy route is to just pick a High Res theme, which you can find by selecting the “Hi-Res” category from the themes menu. There’s a few nice looking themes here, especially the paid ones.

But let’s say that I’m really attached to my theme, and I don’t care about visual consistency. I just want my photos to be as big as they possibly can. To do this, we’re going to have to work with our theme’s HTML code.

A word of warning: Anytime you mess with code, there’s a chance you can screw something up. If something does go wrong, just go back into the themes menu and re-install your theme by selecting it and pressing the “Use” button.

To get started, press the “Edit HTML” button in the Customize screen.

This will bring up the theme’s HTML code. What we need to look for is a tag that says:

{block:Photo}

In between the opening tag of {block:Photo} and the closing tag of {/block:Photo} is the only area we need to be concerned with. Editing any code outside of these two tags is going to affect other aspects of our theme, and we’re only interested in the Photo posts.

What you see in between will vary, but it should look fairly similar to what I have here. You’ll probably have a span class tag, a linkopen and close tag, an img src tag, and a place for the caption underneath.

The span class tag is responsible for keeping the size of our photo in line with our theme, and since we don’t want that we’re going to delete both it and the closing tag entirely.

Next, the img src tag is telling our theme to pull the photo and shrink it’s width down to 500 pixels. We want to change it from “500” to “HighRes”

It is case-sensitive, so make sure you capitalize the H & R.

And that’s it! Click “Update Preview” to preview the changes you made. The size of the photo should be much larger. To save changes, press the “Appearance” arrow to return to the Appearance menu and press the “Save” button.

Music Credits

Background music featured in this video is “One Fine Day” by The Insider and is used under CC-BY-SA license from Free Music Archive.

Up until this week, library users who checked out ebooks did not have the option of reading those books on any of Amazon’s Kindle devices or apps. That’s all changed, thanks to a nationwide roll-out by Amazon to over 11,000 libraries in the US. Unlike checking out a book with Adobe Digital Editions, the process is dead simple, and in this video I’ll be showing you how.

First off, you’ll need a card from a participating library. The library itself doesn’t actually serve up books, but rather contracts out with a company called Overdrive, who may have a sub-site on your library’s website.

Once you enter the Overdrive site, you’ll have to login, probably with your card number or a special PIN. This will vary based on what your library requires.

When you go to search for a book, you’ll want to make sure that the book is a Kindle book. Adobe ePub and PDF books require a completely different setup, and are not viewable on Kindle devices or apps.

You also might have noticed that you can add some books to your cart immediately, but for some books, you have to get on a waiting list. Libraries can’t just loan out as many copies as they want, they’ve got to play by the publisher’s rules and purchase licenses for each copy. Hence, the limited supply.

Once you’ve found a book you want to check out, simply add it to your cart and set the length of time you want to check it out for. Generally, you’ll only have the option of checking it out for 7 or 14 days. Once you confirm the check out, you’ll be re-directed to Amazon’s website to complete the transaction.

If you don’t already have an Amazon account, you’ll need to sign up for one before you can begin reading. Sign in, and select the device that you want the book to be sent to. You’ve got plenty of options that include Amazon’s Kindle devices, apps for nearly every mobile platform, or on the computer through the Kindle Cloud Reader. You’ll need to setup one of these apps or devices and link them with your Amazon account before you can send the book to it. Once you confirm the selection, the book will appear the next time you sync with your account.

When you do sync, the book will appear in the Archived Items folder, click the book to download it and add it to your main library.

Thanks to the cheapness and ubiquity of the webcam, it’s now both easy and affordable to roll your own surveillance system. In this video tutorial, I’ll be demonstrating how to turn a cheap webcam into a motion-sensing surveillance camera.

Hardware

Photo by Mike Burns

The first thing you’ll need, of course, is a webcam. Depending on the quality of the video captured, it’s a purchase that could cost you anywhere between $12 and $100. Unless you’re trying to capture a really wide area, you probably won’t need anything more than the most basic of webcams. An extensive security system is outside the scope of this video, and if you’re planning on spending more than a few bucks on this, it might make more sense to look into an integrated system.

Secondly, you’ll need a computer that you’re okay with leaving on all the time. If your computer isn’t directly located where you want to monitor, you’ll need a USB extension cable, which at the absolute most will cost about $1 per foot. Keep in mind that using any USB cable over 5m (16’5″) will probably see a degradation in image quality.

Software

There’s a lot of different options available to you for recording – at the extremely simple end of the scale, you can just use your webcam’s bundled software and just press the record button. There’s a couple disadvantages to this – notably, if your computer is stolen, you lose all of your recordings on the computer since they’re all saved locally. You can solve this by recording with a streaming video service like Ustream or Justin TV. Ustream, however, has a recording limit of only 3 hours. Justin TV has no limit, but it doesn’t prevent the hassle of having to scrub through hours and hours of footage.

Instead of recording everything, however, you can cut down on your reviewing time by only recording when something’s happening. If you’re running Windows, an application called Yawcam will only take a picture when there’s movement within the frame. You can download it for free from Yawcam.com.

Within the application, you can control the different kinds of recording by pressing any of the 5 buttons in the control window to enable that setting. In this video, I’ll only be going over Motion sensing recording, but Yawcam is a deeply customizable application. If you’re curious about the full extent of its capabilities, check Yawcam’s website for additional information on the other recording settings.

To enable motion recording, press the motion button, and then open the motion detection window from the Window menu. You’ll see this weird blue pointillist image from your webcam on the left with two colored bars underneath. The top green bar is the amount of motion in the image, while the bottom blue bar is the motion tolerance. Anytime the green bar is longer than the blue bar, Yawcam will record this as a motion event and automatically take a photo.

The right side of the window has 3 tabs. The first is Motion Events, and licking on a motion event will bring up the image in a thumbnail below. If I double click on the thumbnail, I can open up a full size version of the image from directly within the application.

The next tab is Actions, which will determine what happens when a motion event occurs. I’m going to just save the image on my computer, and send a copy of the image to my email address.

If I click the Settings button next to the Save file option, I can adjust the image quality, change the folder where it’s saved, among several other options.

In order for Yawcam to send the image, you’ll need to enter your email account information in the Send email Settings. Check Attach Image to send a copy of the image to your email, and make sure your receiving email account has the capacity to handle the attachments. Free webmail services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail are good options for this and provide enough space to handle even the most active of accounts. You’ll also need to enter in the SMTP details from your sending email account in order to send the alerts, which is information you should be able to easily find from your email service provider.

The final tab is Settings, where you can adjust the sensitivity of your motion detection, as well as the tolerance, which sets the level of your blue bar. The easiest way to set this up is just to press the Auto Detect button so Yawcam can automatically adjust your settings. If your camera is pointed at something outside, you’ll need to keep in mind that the difference in lighting at various points during the day can alter the effectiveness of these settings. You’ll need to do some experimenting to get the best settings for your situation.

References & Other Resources

Another really great web-based motion detecting service is Cammster, which will work across all platforms. I couldn’t get it to work quite right with my webcam (it kept defaulting to my iSight camera), which is why it’s not included in the video. Cammster is currently free, though you will have to pay for each SMS alert. Credit to Alan Henry at Lifehacker for the find.

In June of 2011, Tumblr went through a major redesign that simplified it’s user interface and eliminated some of its features entirely. In this video tutorial, I’ll be going through some of these changes.

Dashboard

Where you once managed your blogs entirely from the menus in the right hand side of the Dashboard, this part of the screen is now a submenu for the section you’ve selected from the top menu. The Dashboard submenu now contains links to only the social features of Tumblr. Here you can edit who you follow and see which posts you’ve liked.

Blog Name

Next to the Dashboard link in the top menu, you’ll have links to your blogs. In this case, I’ve only got one, and it’s my name. Click on this link and you can see all of this blog’s posts.

The blog submenu on the right has links to the blog itself, the customize screen, and various other links to this blog’s followers, posts, and messages.

Customize

The customize link is now found under your blog submenu, and the new customize screen has had a lot of options taken out of it. You can still change your blog’s name, theme and add pages here, but Tumblr has completely removed all Twitter and RSS feed imports. According to an email I received from Tumblr support, they are looking into maybe adding Twitter importation back in, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Blog Settings

A lot of people have been asking where you can change your profile photo, now that the option is no longer in Customize. You’ll find that option here in Settings in your blog submenu. Keep in mind that this is a different Settings button from the one at the top. That one is just for your Account Settings.

The Blog Settings screen contains nearly all of the options that were taken out of Customize. In addition to your profile picture, there’s settings for replies, questions, submissions, and sending your Tumblr posts out to Facebook and Twitter.

Inbox

The biggest new feature in Tumblr is the unified Inbox, which you access from the top menu. All questions and submissions from any of your blogs appear here. You also have the option of sending a private reply to any question by clicking Answer Privately. This will send the message without publishing to your blog.

One thing that’s been a constant in personal computing has been that hard drives will continually get bigger and cheaper. So it’s inevitable that you’ll one day want to relocate your Time Machine backups to a newer, roomier drive. In this video tutorial, I’ll be going through the process for prepping and transferring these files.

Start off by plugging the hard drive into the computer. If hasn’t already been properly formatted, open up Disk Utility, which can be found through Spotlight, or in the Utlities folder in Applications. Click on the hard drive in the pane on the left hand side. In the menu on the right, click “Partition.”

From the Volume Scheme menu, select “1 Partition.” If you wanted to partition the drive in some way, you’d obviously want to make a different choice here, but I’m going to leave my drive unpartitioned.

In the “Volume Information” fields, give your new drive a name, and ensure that the Format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled).”

Next click “Options” underneath the list of partitions. Change the selection to “GUID Partition Table” and click OK.

Once you’ve completed all of these steps, click Apply. A confirmation screen appears to make sure that you want to delete the hard drive’s contents. Now might be a good time to double check that you’ve got the right drive selected (especially if you’ve got multiple drives connected). Once you confirm, the process shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Once it’s completed, close out of Disk Utility and right click on the drive in Finder. In the menu select Get Info.

Scroll down to “Sharing & Permissions,” which should appear at the bottom. You’ll need to make sure that “Ignore ownership on this volume” is unchecked.

Close out of the Get Info window and open up Time Machine in System Preferences. Click on the switch to turn Time Machine off.

Next is a straightforward transfer of the files from the old drive to the new one. Use Finder to go into the old drive and drag the “Backups.backupdb” folder over to the new drive.

If you’ve got a lot of backups, this might take a fairly long time. In my case, it took about 11 hours, so make sure you do this when you won’t be needing your computer.

Once everything’s copied over, go back to Time Machine in your System Preferences and click “Select Disk.”

Select your new drive, and turn the switch back to On.

Leave the drive connected to the computer, as Finder will need to go through and index the new drive. Again, depending on the size of the drive, this is a process that may tie up system resources for a few hours.

Once that’s done, you’re ready to go! You may run into a problem later on when you go to delete the Time Machine files on your old drive. Emptying the trash with Time Machine folders inside may cause an “unexpected error” message. If this is the case, force Empty the Trash by holding down the option key while selecting “Empty Trash.”

Is your online job search a repetitive and tiring chore? There’s an easier way that is both automatic and capable of aggregating results from multiple job sites. In this tutorial, I’ll be showing you how with the help of RSS and Indeed.com.

All about RSS

First off, you need to know about this icon.

You might have noticed it on various websites, particularly blogs or sites that are updated often. It’s a link to an RSS feed, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. Paste this link into an RSS reader, and any updates to the feed are automatically sent to it. This means that you don’t have to spend every day visiting a dozen different websites to do your job search. Just use your RSS reader to aggregate feeds.

I’ll be using Google Reader to demo in this video, but if you don’t care for Google, there’s a multitude of RSS readers out there to choose from. Further instructions and a list of other RSS readers can be found after the jump.

In order to subscribe to a feed, all you’ve got to do is right click the RSS icon and select “Copy Link.”

In Google Reader, click on the “Add Subscription” button at the top. Paste the link in the box and click “Add.”

The feed will appear in your subscriptions list on the lower left. When you select the feed, all updates will in appear in the main reading screen.

Where to find the feeds

There’s a ton of job search sites out there, and depending on the field you’re seeking work in, the merits of one or another job site is going to vary wildly. For a general search, however, you almost can’t go wrong using Indeed.com, which aggregates job listings from a multitude of job sites. This means you can see results from Monster, CareerBuilder, SimplyHired, and even corporate sites with a single search.

Start off by defining the search. Let’s say we want to find a graphic design job in San Francisco. As it gives you more options, click on “Advanced Job Search.”

We could do a search for “graphic designer,” but the job titles in this field can vary wildly. It could be “graphic artist,” “production artist,” or “graphics specialist.” Based on looking at quite a few job descriptions in this field myself, I know that the one word that is going to be in there, no matter what, is “graphic.”

If I wanted to get more specific, I could try “Photoshop” or “web design” but let’s start with a wide search and then narrow things down later. We want to search for jobs in San Francisco, but so we keep the search wide, let’s change the location drop down menu to “within 100 miles of.”

Now on the search results screen if you scroll down a bit, you can see the link for “RSS Job Feed” in the lower right.

Copy that link into your RSS reader, and any new results will show up as they come in. As you spend time looking at the results, you may need to refine the search to see jobs that more closely match your needs.

Indeed.com isn’t comprehensive – some sites like Craig’s List aren’t included in the search. Craig’s List does offer an RSS link at the bottom of each job category, however. Just scroll to the bottom and you’ll find the link on the orange box.

If you’re looking to work for a particular company, you might luck out and find that company offers an RSS feed for job openings. A lot of large corporations, unfortunately, use non-standard methods of listing open positions – this means no RSS. Thankfully, it’s these large corporations that tend to use sites like Monster or Careerbuilder to post jobs, so you’re still likely to catch them through Indeed. Your mileage may vary.

Just keep in mind that this is just a starting point in your online job search. You’ll need to keep reading job descriptions and adjusting your search criteria accordingly. You’ll also need to keep digging for other sources that may not be aggregated by Indeed.

RSS Readers

Google Reader – My personal choice, and one of the more popular web-based options available. If you’ve got a Google account, you’re already familiar with Gmail’s text-based interface, which Google Reader is based on.

NetVibes – Another web-based reader, and one that’s far more visually oriented than Google’s offering.

crimsonvipor asks “If I reblog something,﻿ how do I post a picture in the comments section (or Caption)?”

So the problem that we’ve got is that a normal text post has a link off to the side where you can upload photos, doing a reblog doesn’t give you that same link.

If you look at the toolbar, however, there is this green tree icon.

If I click on it, it’ll give me the option of posting a photo if I happen to have its URL.

But how do I get a URL when I can’t upload a photo? I could use a third party photo posting site like Flickr, but I want to keep all my Tumblr stuff together. That’s where this workaround comes in.

Let’s cancel out of this reblog and in the dashboard, I’m going to create a photo post. I’ll upload the photo that I want to add to my reblog, but instead of leaving this drop down menu in the top right set to “publish now,” I’m going to change it to a private post.

This way I can upload it to Tumblr, and it won’t appear in its own separate post. Click “Create Post” and that’ll save it.

Now the photo’s been uploaded, but I still don’t have a URL for it.

If I go to “Posts,” you can see it at the top, and it has the “Private” icon above it.

If I click on the image, I’ll get a bigger version. I can right click the image and select “Copy Image URL”. That’ll give me the URL.

BUT – If there’s a link underneath that says “High-Res ->” in small letters, it means Tumblr has resized the photo smaller so it will display in the dashboard.

If you’re happy with a smaller image, there’s no problem with getting the URL here, but I want the best possible resolution, so I’m going to click on the link and when it opens the image, I’m going to right click to “Copy Image URL.” That’ll give me a link to the full size image.

Back in the reblog screen, I’ll click on the little square tree icon and paste my URL into the first box in the popup window. The dimensions should automatically fill, but if you want to resize it to something else, you can make those changes here.

The image will appear in the text box, and if I go to preview it, I can see my image in the reblog caption.

]]>http://www.thoughtshots.com/2011/05/tumblr-how-to-add-photos-to-reblog-captions/feed/12http://www.thoughtshots.com/2011/05/tumblr-how-to-add-photos-to-reblog-captions/Open ePub files on your iOS device without syncinghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thoughtshots/~3/JmhlcoFb5h0/
http://www.thoughtshots.com/2011/04/open-epub-files-on-your-ios-device-without-syncing/#respondSat, 09 Apr 2011 20:16:55 +0000http://www.thoughtshots.com/?p=205I’ve previously detailed how you can transfer ePub files to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using iTunes and USB syncing, but what if you’re away from your computer or don’t want to deal with the hassle of working with files? Thanks to this article by Adam Engst at Tidbits, you can now use your iOS device to open any ePub file directly from Safari.

In this example, I’m opening a free book from Project Gutenberg’s website in Safari. If you’re given the option of file type, select ePub.

You’ll then be given two options. If you select “Open in iBooks,” you’ll be switched to iBooks, where the file will open. If you select “Open with…” you’ll be given the option of selecting the app to open it with.

The apps that you have to select from will depend on which apps you have installed. Any app that is capable of opening ePub files should appear in this list.

Since I first put up my How to use Tumblr video in September, there’s been an amazing response, and I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who watched and commented. I hope it’s been useful to you.

That said, a couple people have asked some questions that I felt deserved a bit more elaboration than I could give in the comments.

Hibari9420 asked “Can﻿ I post a youtube video? but I want it to be in the middle of the article :S”

This is a situation where Tumblr’s separation of post types by media actually makes things more complicated than they need to be. Go to the watch page of the Youtube video you want and press the “Embed” button.

This will bring up a box with the embedding HTML code and some various options for the size you want it to be. I’ll just leave it at the default setting and copy the code. In Tumblr, create a text post. I’m going to give this one a title and put some text in the post that I want above and below the video. Now press the “HTML” button in the toolbar – this will allow you to edit the HTML source code of the blog post.

HTML is the language of the web – it’s these bracket tags that determine how the text in the post will be formatted. The “p” tag just separates these two sentences into two paragraphs. Since we want the Youtube video to go in between the paragraphs, I’m going to paste in between the lines here.

Press “Update” and that will bring you back to the edit screen, and if you did it right that will show the video. Just to make sure, press “Preview” and make sure it’s formatted how you want it to be.

thedevo01 asked “Can you use CSS and HTML﻿ formatting for the layout and themes on Tumblr?”

Absolutely. I’ve just told you in the last question how to edit the HTML for a single post, but if you want to edit the Theme itself, by go to the Customize screen and select Theme. Press the “Use Custom HTML” button.

That will bring up the source of the theme which you can edit. Press the “Theme Docs” button for additional info and documentation.

xxkatiekatsxx asked “how do you write on someone elses﻿ tumblr page?”

There’s actually a bunch of ways that you can write something on someone’s else’s Tumblr blog, but almost all of them require the person who owns the blog to change some kind of permission first. You’ll need to see if they’ve turned on any of the following Tumblr features:

Option #1 – Let people submit posts. This option means that someone other than the owner of a Tumblr blog can submit a post. The owner of the blog needs to check “Let people submit posts” in the Community menu on the Customize screen.

Then visitors can go to their url /submit to write﻿ a post.

The blog owner has to authorize the post before it shows up.

Option #2 – Allow people to comment on posts. Unlike most other blog platforms, there is no native commenting system in Tumblr. The owner of the Tumblr blog needs to set up a Disqus account by visiting disqus.com. Click “Sign up” and enter in your Tumblr URL and the name of your blog. The “Site shortname” is a unique identifier that’s our main concern in setting this up for Tumblr. It needs to be all one word, no spaces. If you don’t already have a Disqus account, you’ll also have to create an Administrator login underneath. Once you’ve gone past this screen, you can turn on any of Disqus’ optional features. I’ll just leave these at the default setting for now. Now back in the Customize screen of my Tumblr blog, I’ll need to go to the “Appearance” menu. Depending on what Theme you have set up, you may have to scroll to the bottom to get to this. My theme doesn’t have any options for this menu, so all I’ve got is a box to add my Disqus shortname. I’ll enter that and save it.

Now when I go back to my blog, I can see a place noting how my comments my posts have gotten. If I look at the post itself and scroll to the bottom, you can see the box where my readers can add comments.

Option #3 – Allow people to reply to posts. Replies are a fairly new and fairly obscure feature in Tumblr. In order to turn them on, the owner of the blog needs to check one of the available options in the Community menu on the Customize screen. Once these options are turned on, anyone who meets requirements can reply to posts from Dashboard.

This feature is only available in Dashboard and not from the blog itself. When you do submit your reply, it will appear in the notes of the post.